1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the provision of medical services through clinicians' “house calls.” More particularly, the invention concerns a method providing a network of mobile clinicians that individually conduct in-home patient visits utilizing on-site diagnostic and treatment equipment, where service is enhanced by the use of portable computing and communications equipment.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the current American healthcare situation, many sick patients encounter difficulty when attempting to access a physician's office. Some of these difficulties include restrictions on the number or type of health maintenance organization (HMO) visits, limitations of visits to certain preselected physicians, scheduling difficulties, transportation and parking challenges, slow or non-existent insurance reimbursement, and the like. Aged, infirm, or other homebound patients are faced with the particularly difficult challenge of transporting themselves to a physician's office to receive medical attention. Even for ambulatory patients, the current setup can be frustrating to the patient, due to the need to schedule an appointment far in advance.
In contrast to the traditional doctor's office, urgent care centers are geared toward minor, ambulatory emergencies and generally provide office-level care on a walk-in basis. For non-ambulatory patients, the emergency room provides similar barriers to availability as a personal physician's office. Whether ambulatory or not, many patients report a strong aversion to visiting this typically expensive, uncontrolled, slow-moving environment, even among those with a serious medical need. Additionally, gatekeeper triage of acute medical conditions can leave the patient feeling abandoned and the physician feeling that she has taken a measurable risk with the patient's outcome. Nonetheless, there are still more than one hundred thousand visits to American emergency rooms annually. And, even though more than eighty percent of emergency room visits are not necessary to save life and limb, this is sometimes the only alternative for patients requiring prompt service.
As one alternative to visiting an emergency room or a personal physician, some patients call “911” to dispatch an ambulance, especially for medical conditions that are perceived to be particularly serious. Nonetheless, the fanfare and cost of ambulance services can be excessive for many ultimately non-serious medical conditions that typically prompt patients to call an ambulance.
In contrast to the options of meeting a personal physician, visiting an emergency room, or calling an ambulance, many people would prefer to receive acute care in their home or workplace. In fact, the concept of rendering acute care in the home or workplace was the fundamental basis of healthcare for more than four thousand years until the mid-1950s. In the past forty years, however, the concept has fallen out of favor. In fact, between 1960 and 1975, the number of house calls made by family practitioners decreased by seventy-five percent to approximately seventeen million. In 1989, only one million house calls were billed to Medicare. Physicians stopped-making house calls because of many reasons, including inadequate reimbursement, perceived liability, and questions about the quality of care. Each of these concerns is enhanced when dealing with acutely ill patients.
Due to these and other unsolved problems, then, patients' options for obtaining prompt, convenient, acute medical care are not completely adequate today.